Snooker: Zhu Ying - Chinese referee at the 2012 World Snooker Championship

Zhu Ying (诸瑛), sometimes known by her chosen English name of Ivy, is a Chinese snooker referee who has been officiating at the current World Snooker Championship.

Born in Shanghai in 1982, Zhu Ying is the first Chinese referee to appear at The Crucible. After lengthy training in China and several months in England she qualified to become one of the WPBSA (World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association) referees and started appearing in televised tournaments.

Zhu Ying is also a big hit with the Chinese fans and a visit to a snooker tournament isn't complete without having their photograph taken with her.

She maintains a page on Weibo, which is the Chinese equivalent of Facebook or Tumbler. It's very candid and you can see just how much enthusiasm she has for the game. She's also enticed fellow referee Michaela Tabb to join the site so that the Chinese fans can get to know here better.
http://www.weibo.com/refivyzhu

In an interview over on The Snooker Blog, she revealed exactly how she got involved in the game:

Back in 1999 when I was still in high school, I was watching my very first snooker match which was one of the Shanghai Masters. I was suddenly into the beautiful green cloth in the TV and watched all the rest of the series. John did a perfect job and won the Champ at last. That was the start of my snooker dream – John was playing the match with the beautiful table. That’s also why people say John Higgins left me a great impression because when I started, he’s the one who happened to be there and playing.

You can read the full interview (which was conducted at the end of last year) here:
http://www.thesnookerblog.com/2012/04/exclusive-ivy-zhu-诸瑛-zhu-ying-interview/

The BBC also put together an interview with her recently and it's interesting to hear her speaking English:








I'll leave you now with some picture of Zhu Ying in action. If you'd like to see some behind-the-scenes stuff, she posts a lot of pictures to her Weibo page so it's well worth a look. She does tend to write in Chinese, but there are some posts in English too. (I happen to have a Chinese translation service sitting beside me, so it's easy for me).

Not to be confused with the character of Zhu Yingtai (祝英台) from the Chinese legend of 'The Butterfly Lovers' - pretty much the Chinese equivalent of Romeo and Juliet.

Nor should she be confused with the actress Zhu Ying (朱瑩).

1 incredibly skilful tiny knife

There seems to be a bit of a fashion in Russia for making tiny models or replicas. I wrote before about tiny weapons (hence the clumsy title this time round) and this time we're going to look at the process of making a miniature version of a kitchen knife. I'm really impressed by the level of finishing and accuracy.

It's not just knives. Dno, or whatever his name is (I don't read Russian) has a whole host of tiny models.
http://dno.livejournal.com/

Free Game Friday: Spelunky & HyperRogue III

Spelunky is a fairly traditional sort of game in that it resembles a platformer. It's a 2D sprite-based game where you explore a vast network of underground caves, fighting off monsters and collecting treasure. What's unusual about it is that the cave is generated afresh each time so it's always a journey into the unknown.

It's a cute and fun game, excellent for a short gaming session with enough appeal to make you want to come back. It feels a bit like Rogue or Nethack in that you're digging though procedurally-generated caves and gathering up goodies, but there is actually an end to it. At the bottom of every level is a doorway through which you can escape. I haven't actually managed that yet. The game cleverly uses your own greed against you. You'll linger in an area you shouldn't in order to snag a bit more treasure and end up paying the price.

It's free, it's tiny (under 10MB) and you can even download the source code (although they are Game Maker files, so you'll need that to properly explore them). There's an XBox version imminent with much improved graphics.

http://spelunkyworld.com/original.html

HyperRogue III has a terrible title and it's another game that is a bit like Rogue - you're wandering through a dungeon, collecting treasure and killing creatures. The land is split into different areas and you move through them encountering different baddies in each one and finding unique treasures. It's effectively turn-based and played entirely from the mouse.

The thing that makes the game really stand out is that it plays out in non-Euclidean space - the landscape rolls under you like it's being pulled over the surface of a sphere. Download it to see it, rather than have me try to describe it.

It's free, it's tiny (500K!) and it comes with the full C++ source code.

http://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper.php

String theory explained

I'm vaguely aware of how string theory works (or rather, might work). It's an attempt at a theory of everything that tries to unite quantum mechanics. Basically it suggests that quarks and electrons within an atom are one dimensional strands (strings, one might say) and that by being so this makes everything work out. That's about all I know. Superstrings, string field theory, the holographic principle and heterotic strings are just a mystery to me though.

So I was enormously pleased when I was shown the following videos. In them, Professor Edward Witten of the Institute of Advanced Study (at Princeton) explains in fairly simple terms (fairly simple - you do still need to be smart) where string theory came from and how it works.

I love that the internet has this stuff. The cute cat pictures are nice and all, but I wouldn't have any difficulty in getting hold of them without the net, but access to the thoughts of the world's leading theoretical physicist? Kick ass.

Oh and the videos seem to have been taken from something Italian, which means you might have to skip a couple of sequences of graphics as the narrator speaks in that ridiculous jibber-jabber that Italians think is a language. But it sure beats listening to Hawking burbling on in his robot voice.

Oh and I realise that some of you might think that Steven Hawking is hot shit because he's always on The Simpsons and he's written a couple of books that people pretend to have read, but Witten is the real deal.

Jpop: Okay AKB48, you really are freaking me out now

AKB48 - an ephebophile's dream

I like J-pop. It's true. I genuinely enjoy Japanese pop music and have quite a large collection. I even present a radio show about it on some tiny god-awful community radio station (it's not a popular show and everyone at the station hates me). So yeah, I do like j-pop and I don't care who knows it. But AKB48 are just the most monstrously relentless j-pop machine and I think they're going to enslave the planet.

The English subtitles on this Morning Musume hit are rather fun

It all started with Morning Musume, a manufactured girl group who have quite a lot of members. In order to keep the interest of the fans, the members of Morning Musume "graduate" from the group when they hit a certain age and new members are brought in. The girls are encouraged to be effectively "blank canvases" upon which a personality and role in the group will be placed. There are several sister groups to which graduate members can move and from which new members can be drawn. It's a slick operation and the constant turnover of members ensures a level of freshness. The downside is that the management are very strict and controlling to the point where one girl was sacked for smoking in public as it was at odds with the image chosen for her.

Momusu (as us seasoned j-pop fans sometimes call them) might seem extraordinarily manufactured and somewhat sinister, but AKB48 have taken the same idea and just run with it. It seems that every teenage girl in Japan is a member of AKB48. The main group is comprised of four teams (A, K, B and 4) of sixteen members. The point of this is to allow them to perform live every day - the band has its own theatre in the Akihabara (hence AKB) area of Tokyo with the teams taking turns to perform.

Now you might think that it would be difficult to sell out a theatre three times a day, every single day but AKB48 are so popular that tickets are sold out years in advance and are allocated by a lottery. Girls audition to join the various sister groups (of which there are fourteen at my last count) and then elections are held to choose girls to promote to the main group. To give you some idea of the level of their popularity, at the last election, more than a million fans voted. Cleverly, the voting forms are distributed within certain singles, so you have to buy one in order to vote.

Picture by Puramyun31

It's not just theatres that are part of the AKB48 empire as there's a chain of shops too selling nothing but AKB48 stuff and there are now even cafes being opened all over their sales territories. The group controls every aspect of their business and makes sure that fans are always able to spend money on AKB48 music and merchandising at any time.

Since their debut in 2005, AKB48 has been through (by my count)... 147 members. The fourteen sister groups all have multiple teams of 16 members too making for a total approaching around 1,000 current and former members in just a few years. By the end of this article, that number will probably have doubled.

As a further example of the marketing genius behind the group, sister groups are based in other cities and even countries in order to expand the brand and make sure that fans are able to (pay to) see their local chapter any time they like. The sister groups include: NMB48 in Namba, Osaka; SKE48 in Sakae, Nagoya; JKT48 in Jakarta, Indonesia; TPE48 in Taipei, Taiwan; SNH48 in Shanghia, China, etc, etc.

Akimoto Yasushi - he looks more like an
accountant than an evil genius, doesn't he?

AKB48 have dominated the charts in Japan since 2005 and often have more than one single charting at the same time. Obviously the girls don't play any instruments or write any songs - that's down to the evil genius behind it all and a team of composers. The music varies but is usually bubblegum pop of some variety, but what's truly amazing is the way that Akimoto Yasushi is able to dream up bizarre marketing ploys that keep the band in the news as well as the charts.

You can even visit their website and create your own clone and do stuff like download wallpaper of it

For instance, last year he created a CGI member of the group. Yes, that's right - a thousand girls weren't enough so he had to digitise them and make a computer composite. She (it?) appeared in an advert for candy (Ice no Mi - which I've tried and is quite nice) and then a video was released explaining how it was done.




The current fuss is over another advert for confectionery which is a remarkably clever way of getting teenage lipstick lesbianism onto mainstream TV during peak hours. Various groups have appeared on the news to condemn them for promoting fake homosexuality to impressionable children, but one has to wonder if the management aren't actually paying these groups to pretend to be outraged.

Just for kicks, Akimoto arranged for several of the girls to be trained to play instruments well enough to be able to actually play one song live (although they still needed a few real musicians in there to carry them and they're not very good). The official AKB48 anime series is in production right now and will be released later this year.




The latest wheeze is that AKB48 have launched their own ISP. As well as (surprisingly good) broadband, they offer exclusive access to various offers as well as various online features not accessible from anywhere else. Just click on the video above and be freaked out by the baby predictor. Yup, you can upload a photograph of yourself and they'll calculate what your offspring would look like if you mated with a member of the group. Crikey.




I've just realised that I've got to the end of this article without actually showing you any of their music. Well, here's an astonishingly popular song about birthdays. Don't enjoy it too much though - the youngest one is eleven years old. Despite all the appalling j-pop rubbish that I like, I don't actually like AKB48. It's hard to avoid them though and I fully expect Akimoto Yasushi to take over Japan in a bloodless coup and reveal that they're actually all robots.

Oh god, Photoshop CS6 is here already

All images in this article (and indeed in all my articles) can be clicked on to enlarge them

Adobe has decided on a strategy of releasing a new CS suite every year and a point five version six months after that. So here's CS6 with a wealth of improvements to dazzle us all. I'm only going to look at Photoshop today as the thought of churning through new versions of Premiere and Illustrator makes me feel sick. And the mere thought of having to reinstall all my plugins and settings on After Effects just makes me want to die. So Photoshop it is then.

First off: is it any good? Of course it is, it's Photoshop.
Secondly: should I buy it? Of course not. If they hadn't made the interface all dark you wouldn't notice it was a new version at all.

This yearly cycle of CS releases seems a bit stupid, especially where Photoshop is concerned. Having been in development for pretty much 25 years, it's getting hard to add amazing new features. With CS5, when Adobe came to do the 5.5 release they didn't have enough to justify the point five on Photoshop so it was actually just 5.1 and that was that. This version 6 release feels like it's version 5.2 or even 5.1.5. There just isn't enough here to justify an incrementation of the release number. So what is new?

The interface is dark, like it is in Lightroom. I kind of like this as I tend to re-jig my computer interface to be dark anyway. This hasn't been entirely successful in Photoshop as shown by the toolbar on the left side of the screen: the icons are normally drawn with black and a couple of colours of grey, but the new dark interface means they can't use black and the two shades of grey are pretty close together resulting in mushy, difficult to see icons. Kick ass start there, Adobe.

The icon strip on the right which offers quick access to the palettes next to it has kind of grown. I've never quite seen the point in this as I've never had any difficulty in using the tabs on the top of the palettes (or even the Window menu from the menu-bar) to choose the ones I want. As far as I'm concerned, that's just a big strip of nothing that robs me of part of my screen.

Adjustment layers are a bit easier to access and use than they were before, but anyone who's used them before knows how to access them anyway. This isn't exactly a new feature, but I suppose it's sort of nice in a way. That pop-out Properties thing in the screenshot above is apparently new, but I reckon it's been there since version 2 (not even CS2) as a palette. I hate it as it's just another thing covering up the image on which I'm working, whereas when it was a palette it didn't take up any extra space when active.

The Curves function has an Auto button and it's quite good. Most people don't use Curves nearly enough. They can wring tremendous detail and power from your images with just a couple of clicks, but they're scary as hell if you don't understand them. Well, the Auto feature on the Curves function is just dandy - it does a pretty good job off the bat and gives you the opportunity to really see how the tool works.

You can have multiple clone sources. Well this is quite handy if you're working on an image that needs a lot of complicated repair work, but it's hardly anything amazing. I didn't check to see if it saves these sources inside PSD files, but hopefully it does.

Ooh, content-aware fill. Adobe frigging love this and really like to bang on about how cool it is, but I'm really not impressed. It's not new this time around, but they claim they've improved it and now it can be used to move objects as well as delete them.

It works brilliantly on stuff like Mr Sheep in the image above, but removing him is a trivial task that I can do almost as quickly by hand. Noticeably the demonstration images that Adobe is using are of a girl on a grass background, thus just as pathetically easy to process as Mr Sheep.

Here's a more complex image with very little "breathing room" around the bit I want removed. Content-aware fill just falls down the stairs, breaking both its legs and then just lies in a puddle of its own blood swearing that it's "fine" when anyone can see it's half-dead. Sod content-aware fill; show me something that's actually new and genuinely useful.

Brilliant. Photoshop has a couple of new blur tools. They're quite good, but the stand-out on is the excellent tilt-shift blur. It's easily the best tool I've seen for faking tilt-shift effects (that otherwise need quite an expensive camera lens that you'll hardly ever use). It's slick, it's easy and it produces great results so hopefully that'll be the death of tilt-shift forever. I'm sick to death of these. They were cute when there were only a few ever now and then, but over the last couple of years I've seen hundreds to the point where there's nothing clever or interesting about them any more.

Back in the day, when Photoshop first shipped with a Lens Flare filter, I rejoiced. As far as I was concerned, lens flares were so hackneyed and clichéd, that they were impossible to use with any sincerity. When Photoshop put one into the hands of any idiot, it killed lens flares forever. So hurrah for the tilt-shift blur thing!

About the only significant thing in Photoshop CS6 is the Mercury Graphics Engine. Photoshop previously used OpenGL to handle interface graphics. Although OpenGL is cross-platform and easy to work with, it's a bit slow. So now when you zoom in on an image or move it across the screen, the Mercury engine kicks in to make that a smooth experience. But that's about all it does - it has no effect whatsoever on the image you're working on, just the interface.

And really that's that. Photoshop CS6 is new in name only. There's bugger all reason to buy it, just like there was bugger all reason to buy CS5, CS4, CS3, CS2 and possibly CS1. Photoshop has been largely unchanged for several versions now and Adobe are really just tinkering round the edges, afraid to try anything radically different on the market-leading product, but too scared to do nothing. It's maybe 5% different from CS5, if that. And when it comes to improvements in your workflow, well, there really aren't any.

Mystery Monday: Was Jesus Chinese?

Chinesus? Chesus?

Whilst keen to avoid my usual opening gambit of saying "no" and then going on to explain why in slightly more words, I find it tricky to actually have an opinion on this. I don't care if Jesus existed or not and whether he was Arabic, Indian or whatever. The only reason I even got started on this article was because the wife asked "Was Jesus Chinese?" and actually expected an answer.

It turns out that you can pretty much ask "Is X Chinese?" and find someone that says X most definitely is - and that fascinates me. So is there any kind of decent theory out there that can make a reasonable case for Jesus being Chinese?

Well, it turns out that not only was Jesus Chinese, but that he's back and he's a Chinese woman this time round. Game on.

This fine artwork by Christine Till is available to buy here

Professor Gong Yu Hai, who's previously published works about the Analects of Confucius, reckons that the Shan Hai Jing, a classical Chinese text reveals that not only was Jesus a real person, but that he was Chinese.

According to the prof, Jesus was really called Zhuanxu (顓頊) and was born almost 3,000 years BC, which is a little earlier than most scholars would place his birth. Oh and he was one of the "Five Emperors" from those ancient days.

Professor Gong Yu Hai says that at the birth of Zhuanxu there was an empire that was the centre of politics, economics, science and culture for the entire planet (I wonder whom he could mean?). Zhuanxu set up his own manor (in present day Jilin) at the age of 10, inherited the position of emperor at 20 and went to preach in the west at age 30.

The policy of that empire was to unify religion and politics and this Zhuanxu did through the creation of Christianity. So that's that then. The professor gets a little vague at this point both seeming to suggest that Zhuanxu was literally Jesus but also that he was the "prototype" for the Christian Jesus.

Well if that doesn't sound convincing, I don't know what does.

Christianity is relatively new in China. Although there have been annoying missionaries for a while now, Christianity just hasn't been that popular. Mainstream religion in China is a mish-mash of different ideas, customs and traditions picked by the individual. And Chinese religious customs are so interwoven into the calendar that it's hard to turn one's back on them by joining some 'modern' religion.

Since China opened up a bit more to the rest of the world, some of the first people across the border were Christians looking for converts. Apparently we're all too used to them and bored by their religion that it's jolly hard to score converts amongst our population. Christians have always been keen to exploit (in all senses of the word) closed societies and cultures unexposed to their doctrines. So yeah, they were straight through the door when China opened up. This hasn't entirely gone in Christianity's favour however as the Chinese have got ideas of their own and have never had organised religion. Quite a number of Christian cults have formed all over the country, taking Biblical teaching as their basis but adding some wacky new elements of their own and running off out of the reach and authority of the Christian church. Bugger.

Did they get their logo from Star Trek?

There's a sect called the Church of Almighty God and they're mental. According to them, they have 300,000 members (though observers say they might be closer to tens of thousands). They're also known as Lightning from the East, Dongfang Shandian, Seven Spirits Sect, Second Saviour Sect, New Power Lord's Church, True Light Sect and True Way Sect. Whatever they're called, their origins are pretty vague. Their central tenets include that "the great red dragon" from the Book of Revelation ( 12:3 onwards if you care to look) is China and that Lightning Deng (a quiet woman in her 30s from Zhengzhou, Henan) is the second Christ. Oh and she's written a book called Lightning From the East which is the third Testament of the Bible. Ha ha ha, no wonder the Christians are annoyed.

What's especially good is that the Church of Almighty God have the most ingenious recruitment techniques. Figuring that it's easier to convert people that already believe 90% of the same rubbish that they do, they've targeted Chinese Christians and they've not exactly shy about it. Kidnap is regularly used, but they're also partial to a bit of torture and brainwashing. They especially like to target religious leaders reckoning that if you can convert them, you'll probably get their followers for free.

So Jesus is back, he's a Chinese woman and he/she's written a whole new bit of the Bible. And the sect that's following him is coercing people into their congregation to the point where they're a serious threat to other Christian groups in China. Traditional Christian authorities have no control over them and yet are desperate to try and limit their influence in order to promote their official flavour of Christianity. But with no power base of their own in China, it leaves them in the uncomfortable position of having to seek the help of the Chinese government.

Whilst this painting is obviously ludicrous, is it any more stupid than
those of a white-skinned, fair-haired Jesus?

The Chinese government aren't terribly keen on any large organised group outwith their control as they pose a real threat to the country. China has a long history of rebellions and they've almost always come out of such groups, so they tend to stamp on them quite hard. After all, if a group only appeals to 0.1% of people, that's still over 1,500,000 members thanks to the sheer size of the Chinese population. This is why groups like Falun Gong (whose billionaire leader lives in New York), various qigong sects and Lightning from the East are all banned in China. It's not what they're preaching or even how they're doing it - it's all about their size and the lack of government oversight. After all if some guy can make you turn your back on thousands of years of Chinese tradition in order to believe his interpretation of a magic Jesus book, then you'll probably rail against the Chinese government if he asks. Not good.

So the Christian Church is in the uncomfortable position of having to ask the Chinese government to sanction one group over another. The government isn't particularly interested in helping any Christian group, so the official Christians have to be willing to put up with all kinds of restrictions in order to get their seal of approval. Christian groups and churches have to register with the state and there are restrictions on proselytising and public preaching, especially for foreigners. This is particularly galling for the Catholics who are used to interfering in national affairs, but that shit just doesn't fly in China.

All this wacky fun has led to the arrest of thousands of 'illegal' Christians in China and all with the collusion of the Christian Church. Ha ha ha. So keen are they to protect their official brand of Christianity that they're happy to be complicit in persecution of other religious groups, even though they're members of the same faith. I don't like organised religion, so I'm extremely pleased to see them adopting this position.

I'd love to finish off this article by showing you a picture of the Chinese Jesus, Lightning Deng, but no pictures of her exist. Her followers go to great lengths to hide her and make sure she is never photographed. Ironically, the underground Christian networks in China (encouraged for so long by the Christian Church) formed to avoid persecution in less tolerant days have proved equally effective in keeping cults and sects like Lightning From the East hidden these days.